There’s a scene in Percival Everett’s 2001 novel, “Erasure,” in which the main character, a cerebral Black novelist named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, goes to a bookstore to hunt, as writers often do, for his own books. He finds four of them — including “The Persians,” an “obscure reworking of a Greek tragedy” — placed, infuriatingly, in the “African American Studies” section.
The only thing “ostensibly African American” about the book, he fumes to himself, “was my jacket photograph.”
“Erasure,” the basis for Cord Jefferson’s new movie “American Fiction,” is a mordant satire of the way the literary world imposes broad-strokes racial stereotypes on nonwhite authors, as well as a moving portrait of a complicated Black man from a complicated family.
In a fit of fury after the rejection of his latest novel, an abstruse story about Aristophanes, Euripides and “the death of metaphysics,” Monk produces an over-the-top satirical novel featuring an uneducated Black teenager who already has four children with four different women. When the novel — initially called “My Pafology” and supposedly written by an escaped convict named Stagg R. Leigh — becomes a massive best seller and cultural phenomenon, Monk responds with utter disbelief.
“It’s not art,” he tells his fellow judges on a literary awards panel who are showering the book with praise and who don’t know that he’s its real author. “It is offensive, poorly written, racist and mindless.”
Starring Jeffrey Wright, “American Fiction” has been a critical success and a hit with audiences; it was recently nominated for five Academy Awards. It’s also refocused attention back on “Erasure” — and on how much, if anything, has changed for nonwhite authors in the 23 years since the book was published.
Lisa Lucas, who in 2020 became the first Black publisher of Pantheon in its 80-year history, wrote on the social media platform X that the film felt “mildly too close to home.” In an interview, she said that she found it dispiriting that the publishing industry had taken so long to engage with the criticism leveled by “Erasure.”
“It took a movie of a book to get publishing to talk about this stuff to the degree that it’s willing to,” Lucas said. “We all need to re-evaluate the openness of who gets to tell stories and how,”
The movie has also come at a time when new authors of color are engaging with the same questions posed by “Erasure” — and publishers have paid substantial sums for novels that satirize the literary world’s racial inequities.
In 2021, Atria published “The Other Black Girl,” a debut novel by Zakiya Dalila Harris, a former assistant editor at Knopf Doubleday. The book, which received an advance of more than $1 million and was adapted into a Hulu series, is a horror-tinged social satire about an ambitious aspiring editor who is the only Black employee in the editorial department of a major publishing house.
Dismayed by her colleagues’ casual dismissal of her ideas and the industry’s narrow views about how race should be portrayed in fiction, she is relieved when another Black woman is hired — only to suspect that the new employee is in fact sabotaging her.
Another satirical novel, R.F. Kuang’s “Yellowface,” published last year by William Morrow, features a white novelist who steals the unpublished manuscript of a deceased Chinese American writer, rewrites parts of it and passes it off as her own under the name “Juniper Song,” using a racially ambiguous photograph.
The novel, about Chinese laborers in World War I, is positioned to be a best seller, but ultimately critics raise questions about the author’s race and accuse her of cultural appropriation and of being “inauthentic.”
Kuang, a Chinese American fantasy writer, has said she is weary of the literary world’s tendency to promote her and her work as “diverse.” In a recent essay in Time magazine, she described the “cringing pleasure” she derived from the scenes in “American Fiction” that captured the “encounters that every nonwhite writer has experienced” in the publishing industry.
Kuang said in an email that the attention that “American Fiction” is generating reflects the creative classes’ willingness to confront their own biases. But it might be masking something more insidious, she said.
“Another angle worth considering is the fact that the industry stands to profit quite a lot from its own self-criticism,” she said. “A certain amount of lip service paradoxically makes institutional racism very profitable. So one must always be careful of being defanged, co-opted and tokenized.”
Erroll McDonald, vice president and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf and one of the lone Black editors in the upper echelons of the publishing industry, said that many of the themes in Everett’s book feel just as fresh today as they did in 2001. He said he was all too familiar with the book’s depiction of the way white editors and publishers gravitate toward Black stories that reinforce stereotypes, rather than those showing more nuanced depictions of Black life.
The white editors in “American Fiction” — who believe that Monk’s ridiculously overblown book is an accurate account of urban Black life and are enthralled by its possibly murderous fake author — may seem like parodies of tone-deaf executives eager to cash in by exploiting racial clichés. But, McDonald said, they’re actually closer to reality than audiences might realize.
“The marketing and selling of books by Black people remains as problematic as it ever was,” he said. “Publishing remains an industry informed by apartheid.”
Everett’s novel “Erasure” works on two levels: as parody that spins in increasingly outrageous directions, but also as a poignant, multilayered story of its main character’s life. A middle-aged English professor from a family of doctors, Monk spends much of the book in a state of mild crisis, grappling with professional ennui, his mother’s descent into dementia, the legacy of his father’s infidelity and eventual suicide, the sudden death of his sister — and now his own secret identity as the author of a bewilderingly successful work that he hates.
These issues have little or nothing to do with race, and their existence proves the point that Monk has been trying to make all along — that his “Black experience” is just as representative as anyone’s. (Editors “want a Black book,” his agent tells him at the beginning of the movie, when Monk can’t get his new novel published. “They have a Black book,” Monk responds. “I’m Black and it’s my book.)
There’s a certain irony in the fact that at age 67, Everett — an award-winning author of numerous novels, short stories and poetry collections whose 2021 novel, “The Trees,” was shortlisted for the Booker Prize — is now getting perhaps the most attention of his career because of the release of the movie version of his 13th novel, a book he wrote more than two decades ago.
Everett declined to be interviewed for this article, saying he would answer questions about the movie only in interviews with Jefferson, its director and screenwriter.
But in a 2001 interview with The Los Angeles Times, he spoke about “the terrible irony” in readers’ and critics’ response to “Erasure.”
“This book is getting a lot of attention for the very reason that I wrote the book,” he said. “Everybody is interested in the race question … instead of the book itself.”
